Cody Willard: Run run from RenRen (Updated with video)

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A couple weeks ago on the day it came public, Stacey Delo asked me what I thought about buying RenRen. I told her, and I quote: “Run the other way from Renren.”

I went further in my article on the matter too — “I wouldn’t touch the stock with a ten foot pole. I don’t trust Chinese company disclosures and numbers as a general rule, and Renren has already had to correct numbers in their IPO prospectus and has had a board member resign already because of accounting issues at another company where he was on the board.”

RENN has since fallen fully in half where it was when I warned people against the stock.

And my point at the time when I was cautioning my subscribers against the stock was that the only real way to invest in these IPOs is to buy the stocks of the companies scrambling to supply technology to the RenRens and LinkedIns of the world. I suggested Riverbed and Cypress as the ways to invest on the RenRen IPO. And while RENN is down huge since I said to run from it, RVBD is up nearly 20% since that article and Cypress is up more than 10%.

I’m not nearly as bearish about LinkedIn on the day of its IPO, though chasing it when it’s up more than double the pricing of its already richly-valued IPO is not a good idea. But both these companies and all the others coming public are going to fuel the fundamentals and the profits and the ability to raise money for all the companies that sell the picks and shovels of the twenty-first century. The virtuous part of this bubbling cycle is just getting started.

**UPDATE – Cody talks about the best ways to invest in the LinkedIn.com IPO**

At time of publication, Willard, author of Revolution Investing and Trading With Cody, was net long Cypress and Riverbed of the stocks mentioned in this column although positions can change at any time. None of the information in this column constitutes a recommendation by Willard of any particular security or that any security or trading strategy is suitable for any specific person.

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